Article Marketing: You cannot Live without it

What is Article Marketing?
Article Marketing involves writing unique, informative and interesting articles on a subject you're familiar with. These articles are then submitted to article directories on the web. Other sites can re-publish these articles as part of the content on their website as long as it’s published intact and the original authors are given full credit, including any links back to the authors sites.

There are hundreds of article directories on the internet and all will have their own submission guidelines for what is acceptable content and how articles should be written but there are some general expectations.

What Should Be In The Article?
First off, a strong title is a must, something that will make the reader click on the article, something that will stand out and indicates that the article will be of benefit to the reader. For example, "Solar Power Can Save The Planet" is a better title than "Find Out About Solar Power". It has more impact and it showcases a benefit as part of the title ("Save The Planet"). The reader is more likely to click to read the article. Also, make sure that the title is capitalized, most directories like, if not insist on, this.

The article should ideally be around 400-750 words although some directories accept longer length articles up to a few thousand words. They shouldn't be detailed examinations of the chosen subject but give some interesting information while still leaving the reader wanting more, this should encourage the reader to click through to your website to get it, increasing your traffic.

At the end of each article there is a section for the authors’ professional details known as the Resource Box. It’s here that the author can sell the user on the idea of clicking through to their website and the website details would be included along with the authors’ details and call to action.

Why You Need Article Marketing?
There are two main advantages that article marketing can bring, greater exposure of the author and their knowledge, and back-links to the authors site. By writing and publishing quality articles on a subject the author can increase their status amongst their peers and with the public if they get widespread coverage. By depositing articles in the article directories they can gain back-links to their site if the article is re-published, this can increase the traffic to the site as well as being useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.

Publishing articles in more that one article directory can create a good quantity of back links and therefore help in the SEO arena. However, if you publish the same article on multiple directories your article may well be penalized by the search engines under their duplicate content policy and the benefit of the articles from an SEO point of view will be lost. Therefore it is a good idea to write a unique article for each article directory that you will be submitting to. This could just be a case of using a thesaurus to change some words, re-writing whole sentences or paragraphs or even whole articles. The more you can change about each article the better chance you have of it being considered unique content by the search engines.

It Can Be Time Consuming, But It's Worth It.
Creating great articles can be a time consuming process, but nothing worthwhile ever comes easy. There are a number of software tools to help you in the process of creating articles from information gathering tools to tools that create a large number of unique articles from a single base article; these are known as Article Spinners.

If you don't wish to manually re-write each article several times then article spinners can save you a lot of time and effort but their effectiveness may be limited. They mostly use the idea of synonym replacement to change selected words. The better spinners will let you switch whole sentences or paragraphs to create a large number of unique articles and may even submit the articles to the article directories automatically. These may be useful if you intend to submit to hundreds of directories but if you're just going to concentrate on the top 5 or 10 article directories then it's just as easy to write 5 or 10 versions of an article by hand.

However you decide to create your articles, if the articles are well written and informative you could end up with a good deal of quality back links to your site. Increased exposure of you as an author and knowledge bearer, increased website traffic and increased business are sure to be the end result.

Simple Article Marketing.
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